After exploring the arts and spoken word worlds of her native Chicago and the US East Coast, award-winning journalist, poet, and dreamer Clara Rose Thornton visited Germany for what was supposed to be three idyllic months of writing and rest. What followed was nearly a decade of intensive sociopolitical turmoil, with her at the forefront of various movements in Ireland and across Europe. As the Black Lives Matter movement was birthed, the Syrian refugee crisis surged, Ireland legalized abortion and gay marriage, and fresh waves of xenophobic sentiment swept from England to Scandinavia to Eastern Europe, a Black American woman found her voice as a leader for change.

Combining poetry, prose, and sociopolitical essays, Motion Sickness takes readers along the odyssey of a marginalized and daring multi-expat, experiencing on-the-ground tumult and bird' s eye views of living Western history.